"Making the bold choice in the direction of progress is the best thing you can do for your future self."
Toward the end of college my peers and I would frequently discuss our plans for the future. External pressure from parents and professors placed daunting significance on our post-graduation plans. As if the pressure to find a job was not stressful enough, you had to find the right job. But the thing to be most actively avoided was referred to as a “desk job”. Initially this fear seamed naïve to me, as most professions involve sitting at a desk and working in some capacity. But before completely dismissing the concern, I wanted to explore the origin and significance of the aversion to desk jobs. After some thought, it appeared to me that the term desk job is shorthand for a much more dreadful concept: a prolonged monotonous career where one is not fully captivated with work every hour of the day. This desire to avoid a dull career is both reasonable and understandable; however, the initial anxiety about making the perfect career choice clouds our judgement and hurts our ability to think effectively long-term.
The fear of enduring monotony is made worse by a new generation of self-help gurus encouraging us to exclusively pursue passion and be intolerant of boredom. This idea can give us unrealistic expectations about the reality of the working world. No matter what role we choose, we will have to endure frustration and tedium to some extent. This is not to say that we should not follow our passion; if we have a dream, idea or lucrative hobby, we should obsessively pursue this goal in the face of all obstacles. The problem is that people are not always immediately aware of what their life’s work is truly supposed to be. This can make the advice to follow your passion frustrating to hear. We do not need to be explained the importance of following a passion; we need to find a passion to follow. The only recipe for finding a passion involves tenaciously pursuing new and diverse hobbies. While we are experimenting with new interests, we should adopt a perspective that will prevent feelings of fear and indecision while helping us to progress professionally. As a means of alleviating the fear of the, “desk job”, I would like to offer a practical philosophy that will allow us to grow personally and professionally while searching for our true interests.
In the worst-case scenario, the fear of making the wrong career choice can be so crippling that we choose to do nothing at all. Thoroughly analyzing each opportunity and only choosing one path can feel like a daunting life decision that could possibly result in failure. This perspective can lead to inaction or taking the path of least possible resistance. In reality, gaining professional experience in any capacity helps lead us down the correct path, if for no other reason than it teaches us what we like and do not like. Only by discovering what we do not like can we discover our true interests. Any initial fear about our first job choice being permanent should be relieved by the celebration of curiosity taking place in today’s economic environment. With professionals constantly changing roles both within their organizations and to other organizations, people are encouraged to liberally satisfy their curiosity by pursuing new interests. By alleviating the unrealistic expectations of our first job, we can quiet the obnoxiously loud and destructive self-talk and begin to make progress in a defined direction.
Aside from the fear of permanence, we believe the tasks of our first job to be beneath us because they lack complexity and glamour. But for anyone beginning at the bottom of any sort of organizational hierarchy, it is necessary to start out doing repetitive work. Without any prior professional experience, we must invest our time into repeating the fundamentals of the trade. Rather than wishing our jobs to be more glamorous, we should seek to learn the intricacies of our profession and master the craft. To cultivate proper habits and knowledge in any field, it is important to strive for excellence through the initial confusion, frustration and tedium. How can you be looked to make informed decisions if you haven’t spent the hours sifting through information? Rather than allowing dispassion to serve as an excuse for mediocre effort, we should do our best to improve the situation. The actions and behaviors necessary to improve your performance and reputation are well-documented: gain interpersonal communication skills, learn how to improve processes and find mentors to guide you. These actions alone have the power to improve our performance and shift our perspective. Rather than viewing our jobs as a chore that we must we slog through to earn a paycheck, we can use this opportunity to cultivate a social network and invest in our technical skills so that we can build a better future. Making the bold choice in the direction of progress is the best thing you can do for your future self. Take advantage of the best available opportunity by dedicating your concentration on incremental improvement. After we have made it through the initial confusion, we can more clearly assess our decision and evaluate the option of a career change.
Having a job you dislike does not prevent you from pursuing your interests in the morning and on the weekends. With effective time management, you can always find time in your daily schedule to cultivate a new skill or do something you are passionate about. I find this to be an extremely practical approach as you can have the best of both worlds: the income and professional network from a day job as well as the fulfillment from working on a passion project. After small sustained doses of perseverance over time, your passion project could grow into your full-time job. It can feel like dedicating 1-2 hours a day is insufficient for making significant progress, but it is better than not doing anything at all.
Even if we do not find our jobs terribly exciting, we should try to be grateful for our opportunity to gain experience, grow our professional network and earn income. No amount of monotony can discourage us from attempting to find hobbies, passions and projects in our free time that capture our attention and inspire others. The circumstances of our lives will never be perfect, but we always have the choice to capitalize on the available opportunities. Approaching any circumstance with a positive perspective and a contagious work-ethic can improve every situation. Our fulfillment will not be predicated on perfect external circumstances, but on our ability to adapt to external circumstances.
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